Aeno Premium Eco Smart Heater review: A 1/2-inch-thick room warmer

The cost of heating your home has risen dramatically over the past couple of years and there’s no sign it’s going to get cheaper any time soon. So any heater that claims to be able to keep you warm for less is always going to be attractive, and it’s one of the reasons people are going mad for electric blankets.

Heated blankets are great if you don’t mind living in an otherwise cold home, but what if you want to heat a whole room, perhaps one that doesn’t benefit from central heating?

Micathermic panel heaters like the Aeno Premium Eco Smart Heater generate both infrared and convection heat to warm a room, and they are relatively efficient.

It sounds good, but is it worth spending a lot to get a more efficient heater?

Although one of the benefits of infrared heating is that the heater doesn’t get hot, the Aeno’s mica glass does, because it’s both an infrared and a convection heater.

Features & design

• 11mm (.43 inches) thick
• App controlled
• Floor-standing and wall-mount options
• 2.4GHz Wi-Fi adapter onboard

Design-wise, the Aeno is certainly attractive. It comes in black, white, or gray and is essentially a mica glass sandwich: there’s one panel in front and one on the back, with what is presumably the infrared coils in the middle.

The whole thing is less than a 1/2-inch thick, 39.4 inches wide, and 14.4 inches high. Don’t accidentally buy the original model which looks identical: this new model displays the current and target temperature on its control panel; plus, it has buttons to adjust the desired temperature, and a Smart button that toggles between constant heating and an energy-saving mode.

And don’t confuse the Aeno with other glass-panel heaters, such as the Princess or the Devola that our colleagues at Tech Advisor have also reviewed. Those aren’t infrared heaters, and they consume a lot more energy.  

A pair of feet are in the box if you want to operate the heater freestanding, but wall-mounting hardware is also included. Both attach using thumbscrews, but you’ll need some tools to use the included anchors and screws for wall mounting.

The Aeno Premium Eco Smart Heater can be wall-mounted horizontally or vertically; but if you go for the latter, it’s very difficult to see the buttons and display. Otherwise, you just need to look around the side. You can even mount the heater to the ceiling, although you’d obviously need to have an electrical outlet within reach. Incidentally, Aeno recommends hiring a professional for either wall or ceiling mounting, and there is a special setting in the app for ceiling-mount use.

Via the companion app you can set the brightness of the display, which is a nice touch, and you can use it as a remote control to turn it on and off and change the temperature. Although one of the benefits of infrared heating is that the heater doesn’t get hot, the Aeno’s mica glass does because it’s both an infrared and convection heater.

In the app you can set the target temperature from 32 degrees Fahrenheit to 104 F (0 to 40 C). You’ll want to pick a lower temp if you have kids, but the highest will heat up the room faster (and use the most power–more on that later). The mica glass panels can get hot, and the manufacturer recommends locating the heater away from any fabrics, decorative objects or other flammable objects.

A useful safety feature is an auto shut-off that deactivates the heater if it’s tipped over.

Other useful app features are timers and schedules. Use the first to put the heater on for a set number of hours. The second is good if you want the heater to come on before you get up, say, and heat a room you’ll be in later.

It’s also handy to have the app as a remote control if you put the heater in a garden room, as you can turn it on (and off) from the house without needing to go down to the garden.

Handier still–if you have a smart speaker–is support for Alexa and Google Assistant. Once paired, you can not only turn the Aeno on and off with your voice, but you can also set a specific temperature, just as with many other smart heating systems. The first thing you’ll need to do, though, is change the name from Aeno Premium Heater with Display, or you’ll have to say that mouthful every time you want to control it.

The Aeno Premium Eco Smart Heater works well, with the proviso that you’re using it in a relatively small, well-insulated room.

Performance

• Ideal for rooms up to 161 square feet (15m²)
• Efficient energy use

The Aeno Premium Eco Smart Heater works well, with the proviso that you’re using it in a relatively small, well-insulated room.

Aeno says it will heat spaces up to 323 square feet (30m²), but that’s rather optimistic. It does well in spaces around a third that size (including insulated garden rooms), but I wouldn’t recommend it for any room larger 215 square feet (20m²), and definitely not in an uninsulated garage or other outbuilding.

Using infrared means you’ll feel the heat instantly, similar to how it feels when you’re being warmed by the sun.

Because of this, you need to position the Aeno so there are no objects between you and the heater, otherwise it will heat those instead.

The convection element–i.e., the hot mica glass panel–will warm the air in the room, just like a traditional radiator. Aeno says this is one of the Premium Eco Smart Heater’s highlights: it doesn’t use a fan to blow hot air (and allergens) around the room, and it makes no noise.

This is a relatively slow process, however, which you can speed up by setting the panel to heat to 248 degrees F (120 C). At this setting, the app reports the heater uses 783W, compared to around 160W when it’s set to 140 F (60 C).

Reduce the temperature and use the Smart heating mode and it’ll be even less.

Either way, this heater consumes much less energy than many other electric models, which typically consume at least 1,000W, if not 2,000W or 3,000W.

The app tries to be helpful and display power and energy graphs on its Statistics tab, but in truth, they’re not that useful. You can hold your finger on a particular day to see how much energy was consumed, but there’s no way to see how long the heater was on, nor can you input the amount you pay for electricity and see a summary of what it’s cost to operate.

For this review, I used the heater in a roughly 97-square-foot (3 x 3 meters) living room with the normal radiator turned off. The Aeno did a good job of heating the room to 68 degrees Fahrenheit (20 C) and keeping it there, although on a particularly cold December day with outside temperatures below freezing, it took a good few hours to achieve that temperature, starting from a chilly 55 degrees F (13 C).

The most energy used in a day was 1.41kWh–meaning it cost about 49 cents to run–which is not bad at all, especially when compared to the comparably priced Mill Gentle Air, which cost nearly $1 for a half-day’s heating. Don’t put too much weight on that comparison, though, as they were tested in different homes and in different-size rooms.

A running counter in the top-left-hand corner of the app tells me the heater has consumed almost 8kWh in three weeks, along with a slightly pointless history of when the heater was turned on, off, and when it was actively heating.

There’s no graph reporting temperature over time, which would have been nice to see how quickly the room heats up and what the room temperature was at any given moment.

Price & availability

The Aeno Premium Eco Smart Heater isn’t cheap. It’s billed as a designer radiator and costs $399 at Amazon (we weren’t able to find it available for sale anywhere else in the U.S.).

For alternatives, see Tech Advisor’s roundup of the best heaters.

Should you buy the Aeno Premium Eco Smart Heater?

If you want a heater that’s economical to run, and you don’t mind paying an up-front premium, the Aeno is a fine choice.

It will save you money in the long run, but using my rough calculations, it’d take around a year of everyday use to break even compared to buying a cheap convection heater.

If you use it for five of the winter months, it means you’ll start saving in around two years’ time. Of course, there are other benefits: the instant heat you get from infrared heating, all the smart features in the app, the fact that it can be wall–or even ceiling mounted, and, of course, the fact it’s an attractive appliance.

Editors’ note: This review was previously published by TechHive’s sibling site, Tech Advisor.